Xiao Li

xl2710 [at] princeton.edu

Hi! My name is Xiao. I'm a CS PhD student at Princeton University working on computational imaging research. I'm interested in developing novel optical systems and other physical AI systems by combining system design with computational methods or machine learning.

Recently, I have been focused on applying machine learning to the design of metalens cameras for imaging and computation systems. Before coming to Princeton, I worked at Magic Leap and contributed to the imaging optics/nanophotonic display design and the SLAM-based head pose tracking system of AR headsets. I also conducted research in Terahertz photonics at UCLA advised by Prof. Mona Jarrahi.

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Publications

“*” stands for equal contribution.

Spatially varying nanophotonic neural networks
Kaixuan Wei , Xiao Li , Johannes Froech , Praneeth Chakravarthula, James Whitehead, Ethan Tseng, Arka Majumdar, Felix Heide
📚 Science Advances

• Summary: Demonstrated a compact metalens array camera that performs neural network convolution during the image capture. This optical computing prototype performs >99% FLOPS with photons and outperforms AlexNet on CIFAR-10 blind test classification accuracy for the first time.
• Contribution: ML-based device design and optimization, hardware setup and real dataset acquisition, training neural networks with real images

Thin On-Sensor Nanophotonic Array Cameras
Praneeth Chakravarthula, Jipeng Sun, Xiao Li , Chenyang Lei, Gene Chou, Mario Bijelic, Johannes Froesch, Arka Majumdar, Felix Heide
📚 SIGGRAPH ASIA 2023

• Summary: Demonstrated a broadband metalens array camera with learned probabilistic deconvolution to improve the image quality.
• Contribution: Design and setup of the hardware prototype, paired GT and training image dataset capturing and alignment.

Seeing Through Obstructions with Diffractive Cloaking
Zheng Shi, Yuval Bahat, Seung-Hwan Baek, Qiang Fu, Hadi Amata, Xiao Li , Praneeth Chakravarthula, Wolfgang Heidrich, Felix Heide
📚 SIGGRAPH 2022

• Summary: Proposed a computational monocular camera that cloaks unwanted obstructions by jointly designing a diffractive optical element at the aperture plane and a feature-based deep learning reconstruction network to recover the unobstructed image.
• Contribution: Participated in discussions and assisted the experiments.

Tunable terahertz wave generation through a bimodal laser diode and plasmonic photomixer
S.-H. Yang, R. Watts, X. Li , N. Wang, V. Cojocaru, J. O’Gorman, L. P. Barry, and M. Jarrahi
📚 Optics Express

• Summary: Demonstrated a compact broadband terahertz source based on difference frequency generation by pumping a plasmonic photomixer with the dual frequencies from a two-section digital distributed feedback laser diode.
• Contribution: Device simulation(FDTD) and characterization using optical and RF equipment

Patents

• Eyeball Camera for Display System Calibration, US 2021/0014477, WO/2021/011420, CN114128256, EP3997867
• Waveguides with High Index Materials and Methods of Fabrication thereof, US 2022/0128817, WO/2020/185954
• Systems and Methods for External Light Management, WO2020/023266, US 2021/0231951, CN113811803, EP3938824

Coursework

I took a good amount of various senior/graduate level courses, including

• CS: Theoretical Machine Learning, Advanced Computer Graphics, Distributed Systems, Information Theory
• EE/Optics: Biomedical Imaging, Optics and Lasers, Wireless Communication, Semiconductor Devices
• Physics: Adcanved Electromagnetics, Computational Methods in Electromagnetics, Quantum Mechanics, Solid State Electronics

Non-work stuff

• When I'm not playing with cameras and pixels in the lab, I like taking photos, with street photography being my favorite. Here's selected photos that I took with an iPhone.